Try Elysium... I have not used this program personally, but
former co-workers have and they say it works great. I have had
experience with FormatWorks from Capvidia. This is a add-inn for
solidworks and in my opinion stay FAR AWAY from them. If you are
going to be translating large catia files, I would go with a
standalone translator. Your best bet would be to get a rep in your
company to do demo's and make sure you give them the largest catia
file you can get your hands on. Catia is not friendly when it comes
to tranlating to different cad systems. I deel with this on a daily
basis and it will drive you insane!!! Good Luck!!

I did do some preliminary investigation on Elysium, Datakit &
TransMagic.

Elysium was very pricey.
I'm going to down-load datakit today.
...and I have a trial version of TransMagic "Expert" running right
now. It does just about all neutral and naitive translations you
can think of. Yesterday I did a 96meg Catia file and it imported as
an assembly with not apparent problems.
TransMagic is approx. 10K so more testing will be done before we
make our decision.

We had Elysium a few years ago. I was the one to do the
translations, and the version we had (can't remember) was
worthless. I only got usable models 25 of the time. Mostly I got a
collection of hundreds of surfaces.

With Formatworks, I'm able to get usable full solid imports better
than 3/4 of the time. And after that, if there's surfaces, I can
use the built in Solidworks or Formatworks tools to fill the gaps
and create a solid.

My vote goes to Formatworks. I've been using it for 3 releases now.
I can read V4/V5 and write V5 for much less than the price I was
quoted to do the same thing in Elysium.

We have used both RadialSoft and FormatWorks. For V5
translations FormatWorks is by far the best of the two. We have
been using FormatWorks for 4+ years without any problems for both
V4 and V5 Catia translations. A bit pricey, but if you are doing a
lot of translations it is worth the cost in the end.

I had a very similar hurdle.
Big project (6 months of engineering with 3-5 engineers on this
project), customer data in CATIA, and no pre-existing translation
solution.
As with any company, convincing ownership and management to make a
big spend is next to impossible, especially since we're a big job
shop and we don't like to make big spends on one time projects.

I did some serious investigation on how we could handle the CATIA
data, and my VAR recommended 2 ways. First, get Formatworks. Our
VAR gave me a price which I won't post, but it was prohibitively
high. Second, give Adobe 9 Pro Extended a whirl. I was seriously
skeptical about this at first, but we've done half the project now,
and our results are stellar. Since we already had adobe 9 basic, it
was a small upgrade cost (on the order of 100-200$) which was
easily justifiable. Adobe can be used to convert CATIA files into
step, parasolid or iges files, or a few misc. others, then you can
use your Solidworks native process to convert that result into an
import block.

Imports won't let you work with the features, but you will get the
geometry, which satisfies my department's needs nicely. Our VAR
recommended some specific settings for adobe, which I'd be happy to
pass on if there's any interest.

It's worth mentionning that there is a free 30 day trial for Adobe
9 pro extended available for download from adobe's website, so if
you have a one-time need, you could probably satisfy it this way.
If not, the free trial lets you at least evaluate how effective
this tool is. "Try it befored you buy it"

I did some serious investigation on how we could handle the
CATIA data, and my VAR recommended 2 ways. First, get Formatworks.
Our VAR gave me a price which I won't post, but it was
prohibitively high. Second, give Adobe 9 Pro Extended a whirl. I
was seriously skeptical about this at first, but we've done half
the project now, and our results are stellar. Since we already had
adobe 9 basic, it was a small upgrade cost (on the order of
100-200$) which was easily justifiable. Adobe can be used to
convert CATIA files into step, parasolid or iges files, or a few
misc. others, then you can use your Solidworks native process to
convert that result into an import block.

Imports won't let you work with the features, but you will get the
geometry, which satisfies my department's needs nicely. Our VAR
recommended some specific settings for adobe, which I'd be happy to
pass on if there's any interest.

It's worth mentionning that there is a free 30 day trial for Adobe
9 pro extended available for download from adobe's website, so if
you have a one-time need, you could probably satisfy it this way.
If not, the free trial lets you at least evaluate how effective
this tool is. "Try it befored you buy it"

I'd certainly be interested in any special settings required.
I'm in the process of downloading the trial of Adobe 9 Extended as
I speak (type).

I use Adobe 3d reviewer, which is installed in the Adobe Pro Extended version. Just drag the Catia file in the 3d reviewer window, choose what you want to import (surface, solid, planes et.c. , verify that the model is a solid and then export as parasolid. We had to update the 3d reviewer one time to get access to newer versions of Catia. Found the update files on the download section of Adobe.com.

If this is true this will be worth the maintenance alone for
many users.

In the absence of this though the Acrobat Extended route is the one
I currently use and it works very well. Acrobat is a very
underrated application IMHO. Another option is to buy something
like Spaceclaim and get the CATIA v5 add on pack. It is not hugely
expensive. The advantage of goign this route is that the translator
is Spatial's own interoperability one for CATIA (and Dassault own
Spatial....) and from the people I know using it it works
well.

Luckly, my wife, a graphic designer, has a copy of Adobe Acrobat on her computer. So I will utilize her resources, take this home with me, and convert it. Thank you Paul, for uploading that .doc file giving us baby steps.

I think it is time for Solidworks to step up to the plate on this one. When my wife's software has the capability to do this, and mine doesn't, then there is something very wrong.